The colour that travels through time: Dwelling in light in Portugal and Brazil, through memory and crossings
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Abstract
This article examines colour beyond its physical measurability, proposing that it be understood as an embodied, temporal, situated, and cultural experience. Adopting a theoretical-conceptual approach informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, it traces a path from Newton, Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, and Wittgenstein to Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in order to explore the relationships between light, perception, language, duration, embodiment, and world. The white wall serves as a recurring phenomenological situation: it remains recognisable while its appearance changes, supporting the hypothesis that colour does not merely change over time but may render time itself perceptible. Portugal and Brazil extend this question into landscape and culture through the relationships between light, matter, atmosphere, memory, and historically situated practices. Drawing on Pastoureau, Gage, and Batchelor, the article considers how chromatic experience becomes culturally sedimented without establishing any deterministic relationship between geography and culture. Connected by an asymmetrical history, a shared language, and the Atlantic, Portugal and Brazil make it possible to think of permanence through transformation: materials, words, images, and cultural forms cross the ocean and encounter other lights, bodies, and memories. The article concludes that measuring, classifying, or reproducing a colour is not equivalent to dwelling in it, and that chromatic experience constitutes a relationship between body, time, place, and culture. Between Portugal and Brazil, colour thus draws not a boundary, but a crossing.
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